by thepeopleplan | Sep 21, 2012 | performance
95 days until Christmas…
If you are like most small business owners and managers, you started out 2012 with awesome plans:
We want to grow our business, install that new computer program that will save us time, survey our customers and improve the service they get, (insert your goals here)!
How did these work out? Did your company move those “rocks” to improve your revenue, profits, customer satisfaction? Or did you and your staff get bogged down in the day to day of the business?
First, don’t despair—you still have a bit more than 90 DAYS left this year to work on one TOP ROCK before the holidays.
Secondly, don’t blame yourself, blame your People systems. (Most) employees do not miraculously take your good idea, find a solution to best achieve the goal, and the run with the ball until the touchdown is scored. (If you have someone that does this, congratulations!)
The solution:
Change your Culture to one where your People focus on doing more than just their daily “job”:
How:
You need more than a one day strategic planning retreat or manager training, you need to implement the People systems that:
- focus the entire organization on priority goals
- identify the ROCKS it will take to achieve those goals (one per quarter)
- assign specific action steps to individual employees (delegate!)
- coordinate and monitor everyone’s efforts and deliverables to achieve those important ROCKS
- hold people accountable to complete their assigned responsibilities
- learn and improve the process
Most employees (and managers and owners) find themselves on the hamster wheel each day, taking care of customers and having meetings and putting out fires. Then each quarter passes while we wistfully think about all those projects on our “wish list.”
You have to expect every employee to contribute to implementing projects and solutions for process improvement. You need a management process and rhythm to let people know “what else” they can do and get them doing it.
How do you start?
Step One- Define your Strategy and Goals- Mastering the Rockefeller Habits is a good resource to identify your 5 year strategy and one year goals.
Step Two- Design, Define and Implement the 6 steps above that will change your organization’s habits to align everyone with achieving your goals
If you are in the Buffalo area, we are offering a three night workshop (Oct 3, Oct 17, Nov 14) to develop your People Plan™ that will put People systems in place to achieve your ROCKS.
Image courtesy of Danilo Rizzuti at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
by thepeopleplan | Aug 7, 2012 | action plans, culture, performance
You have rewarded your best supervisor with a promotion to manager.
She is the one person you could rely on to put out the fire, lead the charge on an install, and to get stuff done. Now you granted her the authority to lead the team and changed her role so now she has the time to “be a manager.”
But for some reason, she is not transforming the department as you expected.
You ask yourself, why does she:
- Continue to react to problems instead of implementing process improvement
- Work at the level of tactics and today’s work instead of thinking more strategically
- Struggle with holding team members accountable
- Spend more time than you expect in the field/ warehouse/ or “wandering around”
- Fail to implement those projects that have been on your wish list for months or years
Your star supervisor may have the competencies to be a manager, or may need business systems and coaching to develop these skill sets.
Here is a short list of common competencies that both supervisors and managers should have:
- Decisive Judgment
- Planning and Organizing
- Driving for Results
- Managing Others
- Coaching and Developing Others
Supervisors and managers also approach their work at different levels knowledge, methods, time horizon and involvement with process:
| Area |
Supervisor
|
Manager
|
| Change |
Adapting to Change
|
Championing Change
|
| Methods |
Motivating Others
|
Relationship Management
|
| Knowledge |
Functional or Technical Acumen
|
Business Acumen
|
| Time Frame |
3-12 months
|
1-2 years (general managers 2-5 years)
|
| Systems/ process |
Follow and support systems
|
Create, monitor, improve systems
|
If this situation sounds familiar, take a moment and rate your manager on the level of competence for each of these skills to answer the question “is she a supervisor or a manager?” Her development plan would then be designed to improve in these key areas.
Image courtesy of Master isolated images at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
by thepeopleplan | Aug 4, 2012 | culture, job fit, performance
I remember a Seinfeld episode where Jerry and Kramer pretended to be a traditional couple “How was your day, dear?”
Yes, they mocked this but how important are the People experiences to your day at work?
If you had a “bad day” it is often because of the people experiences you had—you had to assuage a difficult customer, a subordinate made a poor decision or behaved badly, a team member did not complete his part of the project and you had to do more work, your supervisor or co-worker was grumpy or critical, or you had to deal with petty politics.
Your day to day experiences with customers, managers and your team and the climate and culture of the office can be motivational or sapping to your energy.
Our firm’s founder Dr Jerry Newman found that social interaction was a key indicator in job satisfaction and retaining good workers in his book My Secret Life on the McJob. In fact, he found that many teenagers stayed at their fast food job even after college graduation partly based on the great camaraderie they felt at work.
A recent Gallup poll found that if someone had a “best friend at work” they reported more positive perceptions of their job, including much higher ratings of recognition, development, co-worker reliability, job importance, and achievement factors.
McDonald’s is leveraging the importance of what they call “Friends & Family” to attract employees.
According to a recent article by our firm’s founder Dr. Jerry Newman and McDonald’s Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer Richard Floersch, McDonald’s actually has very high employee perceptions of their people experiences in their job.
Reward/ Percent Who Love This About McDonald’s:
- Culture 82%
- Teamwork 80%
- People I work with 78%
Image courtesy of samuiblue at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
by thepeopleplan | Mar 4, 2012 | performance
Most managers have had this happen… a good employee seems to lose her enthusiasm. She tends to do just enough to “get by” – work is completely adequately and basically on time, but not to level she used to do.
Perhaps you consider there might be a personal reason causing this change, you hope this is just temporary, or you are just too busy to address right now. But then the employee’s performance starts to drop even more. You ask when a late task will be completed and get a curt response.
The employee starts to avoid you and you begin to treat her with impatience and frustration. You “walk on eggshells” around the employee and don’t know what you can say or do to make a change in this worsening dynamic.
Without addressing this issue directly with the employee – you have been there— it is unlikely things will get better. Often the relationship between you two deteriorates even more.
But how should you approach this now delicate situation? The solution—you know this, too—is that you must have a personal meeting with this employee.
We just had a client that had a very similar situation.
His manager careful considered the key performance issues and made a short list of clear desired behavior changes. After a one hour meeting, this employee is back on track. His response to the manager was “just tell me what I need to do and I will do it.”
Did it work? YES! For the two months since this meeting, he has improved his attitude, focused on results, and reached the agreed upon targets every week!
Here are a few tips to have this meeting to clear the air and re-engage the employee, if this is possible:
- Prepare what you want to say and write it down (and keep it brief)
- Don’t blame, make judgments or assume motivation
- Focus on a few key incidents (one or two issues)
- Explain the impact of the employee’s behavior on job performance and others
- Wait for employee’s explanation and response– spend 75% of the meeting listening and ask open ended questions
- Empathize with their situation
- Describe the changes required by the employee
- Get agreement from the employee to make the expected changes (with a time)
- End on a positive message, express confidence in the employee’s ability to make the changes
- Remember the military leadership guideline (4p’s)- Praise in public, pound in private
- Follow up with employee at agreed upon time—praise efforts to improve and/or reinforce need for required changes (if employee has not corrected performance issues)
Image courtesy of Danilo Rizzuti at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
by thepeopleplan | Aug 29, 2011 | job fit, performance
A 2010 survey by the Corporate Leadership Council of the Corporate Executive Board asked 880 high-potential employees if they were planning to leave their jobs in the next 12 months.
More than 25 percent said they had plans to leave! (This was 2.5 times more than a survey five years prior).
Many indicated current experiences are not providing development opportunities (64 percent). The survey assessed levels of “passion” and discretionary effort to measure engagement, which declined 30 percent in just one year from the 2009 survey.
What are you doing to provide mastery opportunities for your best employees? When the economy is in full swing (and perhaps before) these highly valuable and highly employable key people will have no problem finding another job that better meets their professional and personal needs.
Read full article:
The Care and Feeding of High-Potential Employees
Image courtesy of amenic181 at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
by thepeopleplan | Jun 16, 2011 | culture, performance
When an employee does not do what you expect… what could be the reason?
Here are twelve, listed by the main sources- employee motivation, ability, values, and the organization’s performance management.
Performance management:
- They don’t know what they are supposed to do
- They think they are doing it
Ability:
- They don’t know how to do it
Values (Beliefs):
- They believe your way will not work
- They believe their way is better
- They believe something else is (or was) more important
Motivation:
- They don’t know WHY they need to do it
- There is no positive consequence when they do
- There is no negative consequence when they do NOT do it
- They are rewarded when they do NOT do it
- They are punished when they do it
- They expect a negative consequence when they do it
Image courtesy of pakorn at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
